TWO

      The next day, Ryder headed back to the hospital to check on Emma. He’d put a patrol on her door while he did some digging on both the pretty PI with the head wound and the two goons who’d allegedly left her for dead.

      One perk of being a vice cop, if there was such a thing. He had a lot of confidential informants who’d squeal for anything from money to food to opioids to get them through the day. He didn’t hand out drugs as prizes, but he did offer people cash to get food or do whatever their conscience allowed or forced them to do. Some of his informants had turned their lives around and often thanked Ryder for helping them. Some died or disappeared.

      But last night, one had come through for him.

      “I saw her,” the kid everyone called Junior had told him in a hushed voice while they hid behind some buildings and trees about a block from the Triple B. His eyes were swollen from too much vodka and pot and his face showed signs of a whole lot of soul-searching and streetwalking. “She was pretty. Stood out. Asked a lot of questions. Wanted to know if any underage teens hung out at the Triple B.”

      “Underage teens? So you think she was looking for someone? A runaway maybe?”

      “Maybe. I told her all kinds come and go and she mentioned a name, but then I got out of there when Bounce and Ounce started stalking her.”

      Ryder showed the CI a grainy picture of Emma he’d pulled from a social media page. “Does this look like the woman you saw?”

      “Yep. I think that’s her. I remember that shiny hair—like red wine. She looked tough.”

      “Yeah.” Ryder could attest to that and the shiny auburn hair. “Do you remember the name she mentioned?”

      “No. Like I said, I had to leave quick.”

      So now Ryder had established she had been in the bar and why she might have been there. And he had a possible eyewitness to seeing Bounce and Ounce going after her. But he knew from past experience the kid wouldn’t go on record with this information.

      He’d given the kid a twenty. “Go get a shower and some food at the shelter down the street.”

      Ryder figured the kid would buy drugs and liquor with the money but prayed he’d at least get some food in him. Nasty business, the things Ryder saw each day. But he always remembered his daddy’s advice.

      “Pray the ugly away.”

       I’m trying, Daddy.

      Remembering his larger-than-life father who’d been sheriff in Denton County for twenty-eight years before he’d been shot down while off duty, Ryder again wondered why he did this job. He’d just gone off to college when his dad had died. Ryder had come home and finished up at a junior college near the ranch. Criminal justice. Then he’d headed to the police academy and never looked back. Or maybe he always looked back. Hard to tell.

      He wanted justice, of course. He could go home to the ranch that had been in his family for generations and make a nice living off the livestock and the land, but this job kept tugging him back. According to his mother, he had a death wish. One she and his teenaged sister wanted him to give up.

      Ryder wasn’t quite ready to walk away from crime.

      Especially not now. Emma Langston had put a kink in his undercover investigation, but she’d also rallied some long-lost thread of feeling inside his heart. Curiosity had him by the throat. Her expressive eyes had him by the heart.

      Not wise. No time for such notions. He didn’t take the time to have a love life. His job scared women away. His mother tried to set him up with fine, upstanding churchgoing single women. But the minute he mentioned working Vice in downtown Dallas, he never saw those sweet women again and usually saw wedding photos of them on social media. That kind married doctors and lawyers and ranchers. Not detectives who walked through the seamy, ugly side of life. Nope. No time to even think about Emma’s immediate hold on him.

       She’s not that kind.

      Okay, his always-arguing brain had him on that one.

      She was not that kind at all. Different. Tough. Determined. Strong. Afraid. Secretive. Reckless and ruthless.

      Maybe he didn’t need her kind in his life either.

      But he checked with the nurses’ station and got permission to go in and see Emma even while his brain told him to let it go. Then he talked to the officer who’d stood watch.

      “All quiet,” Seth Conyers said. “I sat in that chair all night and I have the bad back to prove it.”

      “I’ll be here for a while,” Ryder told the officer. “Go on home to your wife. I’ll stay until your relief shows up.”

      Ryder didn’t want to be at the station right now anyway. As he’d figured, Bobby Doug Manchester had shown up to speak to the chief about “the constant barrage of criminals and indecent people who walked the streets of Dallas.” Ryder had left with the echo of the pompous businessman’s sarcastic wrath ringing in his ears.

      “You keep at it, Detective Palladin. You’re doing such a great job.”

      Ryder knocked and heard Emma call out, “Come in.”

      She sat up in bed, her blue-green eyes watching the door with an alertness he recognized all too well as a flight risk. But her color was back and, other than a few bruises and the bandage on one side of her head, she looked much better.

      Lifting her chin, she asked, “Did you